The Gods of the Mortal Realms

Most fantasy worlds keep their gods at a distance, half-heard voices behind the veil. The Mortal Realms do the opposite. Here the gods stride onto battlefields in person, found empires with their own hands, and can be wounded, humbled, or slain like any other combatant, only on a scale that reshapes creation. To follow the story of the age is to follow a quarrel among divine powers, and knowing who they are is the surest map to the wars they wage. This is a guide to the great gods of the realms and the ambitions that drive them.

Gods Who Walk the World

The divinities of the realms are not distant abstractions but active players, each the head of a faction, a philosophy, and a war. Many first rose to prominence in the golden Age of Myth, when Sigmar gathered them into a grand pantheon to build a civilization together. That alliance shattered in the Age of Chaos, and the gods have circled one another warily ever since, sometimes allied, more often rivals, always ambitious. Understanding their tangled loyalties is the fastest way to grasp why the Grand Alliances fracture and reform the way they do. It bears repeating that these are not remote, unknowable powers. They can be reasoned with and deceived, wounded and even slain, and more than one has died or been diminished within the memory of the current age. Their might is vast but not limitless, bound up with the faith of worshippers and the domains they hold, so that a god cut off from believers or homeland may wither like any mortal thing. That fragility is precisely what makes the divine politics of the realms so volatile and so bloody.

Sigmar and the Powers of Order

At the head of the Grand Alliance of Order stands Sigmar, the God-King enthroned in the heavens, whose Stormcast Eternals are the storm that reconquered the realms. Around him gather the other builder-gods. Alarielle, the Everqueen of life and radiant mistress of the Sylvaneth, embodies the stubborn return of green things after every burning. The twin aelven deities Teclis and Tyrion, gods of magic and of war respectively, remade their people as the Lumineth Realm-lords and pursue a vision of perfection that borders on arrogance. And the duardin smith-god Grungni labours in the forge-light, having lent his craft to Sigmar's cause after his brother Grimnir was sundered into the burning ur-gold of the mountains. The Fyreslayers still mine that shattered god from the earth in glowing fragments, a reminder that in the realms even a deity can be broken into treasure and dug up piece by piece. For the God-King's own story, read the God-King Sigmar.

Nagash and the Dominion of Death

Against the builders stands the coldest ambition in creation. Nagash, the Great Necromancer and Undying King, holds that every soul in existence is his rightful property, and that death is not an ending but a debt owed to him. Once a member of Sigmar's pantheon, he betrayed it in pursuit of absolute dominion, and he has spent the age raising bone-legions and tearing at the veil between the living and the dead. His overreaching schemes birthed the Necroquake and nearly swallowed the realms whole. Nagash is less a villain than a force of nature with a grudge, patient beyond mortal comprehension and impossible to truly kill. His full story waits in Nagash and the Realm of Death.

The Old Gods and the New

Some divine powers answer to no alliance but their own. Morathi, the serpent-queen of the Daughters of Khaine, spent centuries hoarding the stolen essence of the murdered war-god Khaine before ascending at last to true godhood, her being split between a regal oracle and a monstrous Shadow Queen. Her brooding kinsman Malerion broods over the realm of shadow, master of secrets and umbral magic, biding his time. These aelven powers nominally march under Order's banner, yet they pursue agendas so private and ruthless that their allies watch them as closely as any foe. In the realms, a shared cause is no guarantee of a shared purpose. Between them, Morathi and Malerion embody the deep ambivalence of the aelven gods, powers of Order in name who serve chiefly themselves, and whose place in Sigmar's alliance is a knife the God-King must keep always within his sight.

Gorkamorka and Kragnos, the Gods of Ruin

Destruction has its gods too, and they are the most honest of all. Gorkamorka, the twin-natured god of the Orruk Warclans, is brutal cunning and brutal violence bound in one green hide, and his worship consists chiefly of fighting well and often. In the current age he has been joined by Kragnos, the End of Empires, an ancient god of pure ruin freed from aeons of imprisonment, whose waking helped usher in the Era of the Beast. Where other gods dream of thrones and dominion, these two dream only of the next great battle, and there is a terrible simplicity to their faith that makes them impossible to bargain with.

The Shadow of the Dark Gods

Over everything falls the shadow of the four Chaos Gods, the ruinous powers whose invasion ended the golden age and whose servants still gnaw at the realms from every wound. Their mortal champions muster beneath the banners of the Slaves to Darkness, while dedicated legions embody each god's particular ruin: the skull-hunting rage of the Blades of Khorne, the scheming sorcery of the Disciples of Tzeentch, and the joyous rot of the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Unlike the walking gods of the realms, the Dark Gods rule from beyond the world, vast and formless, feeding on the passions of mortals. They cannot be met in open battle, only resisted, and their patience is longer than any age. It is against their endless hunger that every other god, however divided, ultimately measures itself. It is the one truth on which all the rival divinities secretly agree: that whatever they do to one another, the deeper darkness must never be permitted to win.